Technical / Twitter locks account that encouraged people to hold coronavirus parties

San Francisco: Twitter has locked conservative site The Federalists account for encouraging young, healthy people to organise novel coronavirus “chickenpox parties” under controlled quarantine.

The tweet in question was also removed for violating the policies of micro-blogging platform.

“The account was temporarily locked for violating the Twitter Rules regarding COVID-19,’ a company spokesperson told The Verge on Wednesday.

The Federalist tweeted an article where an Oregon physician urged readers to “seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach” to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Twitter on Tuesday admitted that it will not be able to remove every Tweet that contains incomplete or disputed information about new coronavirus (COVID-19).

There has been a massive surge in fake content related to new coronavirus pandemic on various social media platforms including Twitter.

“We want to make it clear that we will not be able to take enforcement action on every Tweet that contains incomplete or disputed information about COVID-19,” the company tweeted.

Twitter is likely to bring back public-facing verification requests for health experts to battle the spread of misinformation in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.

This comes at a time when the microblogging site has taken aggressive steps to beat back a wave of hoaxes and other misinformation that’s spread on social media in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.